Will matcha chocolate tea sell in the land of lattes?

At the Koots Green Tea shop in Bellevue's Lincoln Square, Kouta Matsuda is a tanned, 30-something vision in navy blue. He looks more rock star than businessman, more casual shopper than dogged entrepreneur.

The powers that be might want to remember this face. In the heart of this country's cafe culture, Matsuda is launching an effort to do for green tea what Starbucks did for coffee.

Matsuda, by the way, has tilted at the beverage culture before. In the tea-steeped world of Japan, he built Tully's into a profitable 300-store enterprise, with plans to expand threefold still.

Now, as his new chain seeks to travel westward, it prompts the question:

Is America ready for real green tea?

Walk into the Koots cafe, and it seems like Japan's answer to Starbucks. The décor is decidedly specialty cafe, only with bamboolike table tops and chair cushions wrapped in a subtle, dark-silver kimono pattern.

Where one might envision chocolate suede couches, the store features a tatami mat seating area, with a mini tokonoma. (The alcove, found in traditional Japanese homes, features decorations that depict the change of the seasons.)

Instead of travel mugs, Koots offers slim stainless-steel tea canisters, good for carrying the loose organic Japanese teas it sells for anywhere between $7.95 and $19.95 per 50-gram bag.

Its showpiece: green-tea based drinks, such as matcha chocolate (white-chocolate chips whisked in green-tea powder with steamed milk and organic whipped cream) and the kuromitsu latte (made with green-tea powder and enhanced by Japanese molasses.)

Tully's Japan gave Matsuda the experience to run a string of specialty cafes, but Koots was his long-term goal. "This was my ultimate motive," he said, sitting in the cafe on a recent weekday. "This is my dream."

Early business dreams

Matsuda was 5 when the family left Japan for Senegal, where his father worked in the seafood industry. Five years later, the family moved to Lexington, Mass.

Away from his native home, Matsuda often sought to introduce others to Japanese culture. He started with food — and his friends.

"I'd try to make [them] eat raw fish," he recalled. "Everybody hated it."

At a time when American fast-food outlets were spreading around the world, Matsuda thought of one day opening a chain of casual, conveyor-belt sushi restaurants that would give Americans a taste of Japanese culture in a nonthreatening way.

After high school, Matsuda returned to Japan to pursue an international business degree from Tsukuba University.

Matsuda was a banker when a childhood friend wrote him about the burgeoning cafe culture in the U.S. and proposed that he start a chain in Japan.

Mastuda shunned the idea. "I don't like coffee in the first place," he told his friend.

But on a return visit to the U.S. in 1995, he became intrigued by the specialty-coffee business. Matsuda flew to Seattle to investigate the roots of the cafe culture, with plans to start a chain of his own.

"I fell in love with Tully's," he said. "I felt it was the best."

Facing the competition

By 1997, Matsuda opened his first Tully's in Ginza with $600,000 borrowed from family and friends.

The upscale fashion district in Tokyo boasts some of the most expensive retail space in Japan. But Matsuda held down costs by serving as the cafe's sole full-time employee for a year and a half, pulling down 18-hour shifts and sleeping several nights out of the week on a cafe sofa.

By the time Matsuda had enough money to open more stores, he faced another hurdle: Starbucks had entered the market and landlords seemed to favor that brand.

Tully's Japan took a far different route from its competitor, seeking a nearly divergent market. Whereas Starbucks targeted younger, fashion-forward Japanese women (the barometers of cool in Japan), Matsuda opened new locations in office districts, where coffee was a necessity, not a fad.

He added food to the menu that appealed to Japanese palates, such as the shrimp and egg "sando" (short for sandwich). Tully's allowed smoking in its cafes — also an important draw in a country where a cigarette-vending machine is never too far away.

Tully's opened its second location in Kamiya-cho, a place dotted with embassies and the Tokyo offices of international corporations. At a time when to-go orders were culturally uncouth, the 25-seat location served 1,000, mostly takeout, customers a day.

This left a powerful impression on Matsuda. He decided to open the first coffee kiosks in Japan — places that were "100 percent takeout" — inside corporations such as Mitsui (Japan's largest trading company and an eventual investor), Unisys and JP Morgan.

After Tully's convinced Nissan to let it open a kiosk in the car-maker's Tokyo showroom, the location drew eight times the traffic and tripled its car sales, Matsuda said.

Last fall, Matsuda's company Foodx Globe paid $17.5 million to own the trademarks and intellectual property rights for Tully's Japan.

In a twist, its onetime parent, Tully's U.S., has relied on that cash to fund its present growth. One of its new-concept cafes is around the corner from Koots, on the same level of Lincoln Square.

Long-term vision

Koots' first U.S. location opened May 13 in Bellevue's upscale mixed-use development, an event marked with taiko drummers, a ceremonial blessing and visits by former Gov. Gary Locke, former Seattle Mariners relief pitcher Shigetoshi Hasegawa and developer Kemper Freeman, Jr.

While customers may be drawn to its aesthetics, Koots' challenge will be to appeal to their palates.

Tea rooms, which serve and sell specialty teas, have become popular in the past decade, rising from 200 to 2,000 locations nationwide, according to the Tea Association of the USA. Last year, Americans drank more than 50 billion servings of tea — 87 percent of which was of the black variety. And of the 220 million pounds of tea imported to the U.S. last year, green tea accounted for 15 percent of the total. Teas imported from Japan made up just .53 percent.

But most Americans have yet to taste true green tea. Most U.S. tea manufacturers blend green tea with other flavors to compensate for its mild flavor and to appeal to Western tastes.

Starbucks-owned Tazo Tea, for instance, sells a line of spruced up green-tea bottled beverages, such as Plum Delicious (a selection of green teas brewed and blended with pomegranate and plum juices) and Passion Potion (green teas, mint and lemongrass blended with pear and apple juices.)

"It's green tea-plus," said Joe Simrany, president of the tea association.

Many of Koots' beverages use matcha, a frothy green-tea powder perhaps too bitter for some palates. (The green tea served in Japanese restaurants tends to be sencha, a mild, boiled green tea made from young leaves.)

But Koots has received some help introducing matcha to the masses: Starbucks last summer introduced a highly successful line of green-tea based drinks, including the matcha-infused Green Tea Frappuccino. (Its newest version includes a touch of blackberry syrup.)

Matsuda said he has no illusions of overnight success. The company will open a second location at 2200 Westlake and up to eight other stores before moving to other markets along the West Coast.

Matsuda said he chose Lincoln Square as the first U.S. location because it would eventually hold a captive audience — an office tower that includes Eddie Bauer's worldwide headquarters and Microsoft's worldwide sales offices.

And if his vision persists, America will one day become a full-fledged Japanese green-tea-drinking nation, one that clamors for matcha Americanos, Genmaicha tea and black-sesame smoothies.

"I'm looking at it long-term," Matsuda said. "[The] Japanese and Chinese have been drinking teas for 4,000 years. Look at how healthy we are."

Monica Soto Ouchi: 206-515-5632 or msoto@seattletimes.com